The High Nelly bike wheels turn full circle

Marty Mannering is restoring old memories as well as old bikes with his company, he tells Richard Fitzpatrick

PEOPLE looked funny at Marty Mannering when he founded a bike restore company 12 years ago. It was the height of the Celtic Tiger boom. People were more interested in open-top cars than careering around the countryside on a rickety old High Nelly.

“I wanted to do something that nobody else was doing, and bicycles in Ireland were looked down on,” he says. “It was the opposite way to the rest of Europe where you were considered intelligent. The attitude there was ‘fair play to you for getting a bike because it makes sense’ whereas in Ireland it was ‘you must be having a bit of a problem if you’re riding a bike and can’t afford a car’. I knew that given time that philosophy would change.”

Now look who’s laughing. The High Nelly Bike Company, which is based in Cappamore, Co Limerick, is the only one of its kind in the country. Earlier this year, Peter Casey from Dragon’s Den bought a 10% stake in Mannering’s company. In February, Mannering sent a High Nelly to Barack Obama in the White House, as part of a drive to crack the American market. His order book is full for the next year. It was Mannering who petitioned the government to start its Cycle to Work tax scheme. There is now 11 High Nelly clubs around Ireland, with 2,000 members, part of a craze for “tweed ride clubs” around the world. The Irish ones, of course, tap into a sentimental attachment to the High Nelly in this country.

The High Nelly —, which Michael Collins famously used to get around unmolested during the War of Independence while there was a £10,000 bounty on his head — has been a favoured mode of transport for generations of Irish. Mannering’s grandmother used to ride 17 miles three times a week from Co Meath to Dublin’s Smithfield Market carrying a load of vegetables in her bike’s side-saddles. Her sons had to push the bike to get her going; and if she stopped, the bike was too heavy to pick up off the ground.

“I have an exhibition which I take around to schools,” says Mannering. “The main reasons behind the High Nelly being so important for people is that before, you had no other form of transport. For the normal working class person, the bicycle was the transport revolution. Trains didn’t go everywhere. Not everybody could afford a horse or a car.

“The bicycle was invented in the late-1800s. A production company, Raleigh, set up base in Ireland in the 1930s. Then it just boomed. Everybody could afford a bike all of a sudden on a weekly payments scheme that Frank Bowden, the owner of Raleigh, put in place. Everyone relied on the bicycle.”

One of Mannering’s recent clients had him restore a High Nelly that used to belong to a runner for Pádraig Pearse during the 1916 Rising. As for cost, The Cailín (€860) is cheaper than the male version, The Irish Rover (€1,350). The company also produces vintage, 1920s-style ice-cream vendor bicycles, and provided 36 High Nellies last year for the filming of Ken Loach’s movie, Jimmy’s Hall.

Mannering, who is originally from Middlesbrough, England, is the son of Irish parents. He moved to Ireland 20 years ago, and runs the business with his son, Paul. They pride themselves on never turning away a client who wants to restore a High Nelly. He says the bike’s chassis, which is made from Reynolds 531 gun muzzle grade steel tubing, is indestructible.

“If somebody brings into us a rattling wreck — a bike that was left at the bottom of a river for two, three years — and the person thinks it was good for nothing, we would bring it back to the exact same condition that it was bought from a shop in the early-1900s. It’s the chassis of the bike that survives. The rest of the bike rots away — the wheels, the mudguards disappear — but it’s the frame and the forks that ends up being the mainstay of the bike. That’s the thing with the serial number, the thing that was made by hand to last forever.

“I love to see somebody carrying a bike in a couple of fertiliser bags, because when they see the thing that had been hanging up in a shed on a bit of baling twine for the last 50 years, and it was their great-grandfather’s bike, and when they see the finished product — which might have dents from a shovel from days down the bog, but it will now be sandblasted and powder-coated — they break down in tears.”

- As part of the Elemental Arts and Culture Festival, the High Nelly Bike Company Display is at 12-4pm, Saturday, September, 13 at Bedford Row, Limerick. For more information, visit: www.elementalfestival.com .